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The only silver lining here is his transparency about being wrong -- and providing evidence of that publicly. Given DOGE's culture of prioritizing avoiding acco

The only silver lining here is his transparency about being wrong -- and providing evidence of that publicly. Given DOGE's culture of prioritizing avoiding accountability and transparency measures like FOIA [1], it's almost sadly laudable. [1] https://www.cjr.org/feature-2/trump-100-legal-battle-for-doge-transparency.php https://www.cjr.org/feature-2/trump-100-legal-battle-for-dog...

rsynnott 1y ago
But he still doesn't seem to get the seriousness of the situation, at all. Like, he's saying no-one should have used his stuff, but also "It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script". For instance, imagine you have surgery, and die of a complication. Your relatives will feel very differently, and be in a very different legal situation, if the hospital's explanation is "surgeon was the bottom of their class" vs "yeah, we just handed a visiting 5 year old a scalpel to see what would happen". Neither are ideal, obviously, but the latter is _criminal_. The idiot in the article is clearly closer to the 5 year old than the scraping-a-pass surgeon; he is simply not in any way a proper person to have been given the sort of access or authority he was, this would have been obvious to whoever gave it to him, and whoever gave it to him is at least morally culpable.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  I mean, hindsight is 20/20, but that's probably why it's a bad idea to give a gaggle-load of inexperienced tech sisses/bros the ability to do stuff like this. Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. Drawdowns of the federal government should be measured and deliberate and done by grey haired people not given to rash action. Not by a kid with a python script he thinks is kind of cool.
  - roenxi 1y ago
    If anyone thinks drawdowns should be done of the US federal government they aren't anywhere near the levers of government. There hasn't been one of those in the best part of a century as I recall. > Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. I doubt anyone with decision making power is surprised - the flow of events has been both predictable and predicted. Whatever the goals with DOGE were it wasn't spending cuts or finding efficiencies. The first is in opposition to the preferences of the US Republicans as expressed in their actual voting patterns and the second is largely irrelevant and they weren't set up to do that.
    - acdha 1y ago
      > There hasn't been one of those in the best part of a century as I recall. That’s just saying your media diet doesn’t cover it. Agencies adjust all the time (every year has a new budget and priorities from Congress), and there was a big Clinton effort which cut hundreds of thousands of jobs and restructured agencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinventing_Government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv... That tends not to get mentioned because it wasn’t disruptive – they actually took time to plan it – and because it happened under a Democratic president, the Republicans aren’t going to acknowledge it.
      - roenxi 1y ago
        And it had no impact [0]. Increases in US Federal spending look like a jump from 5% to 20% of GDP. "Cuts" look like a flat line at 20%. Although I don't know what the situation might have changed post-COVID (higher again). If we're defining "drawdowns" to mean "hold steady" then sure, lots of those. If it means drawing spending down then there technically was one in the 1940s. The proper terms for what we're seeing are "reallocation" or "expansion" depending on the congress. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...
        acdha 1y ago
        Take a closer look at that chart. Notice the pronounced downward trend on the blue line (federal) starting from a peak in 1992 and declining until the Bush administration unbalanced the budget? In 1998-2001, we had a budget surplus! https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs-images/44xxx/44715-land-figure3-1.png https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs... https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181 The big thing, of course, is that total spending is a crude metric lumping discretionary and mandatory spending together. Federal employment has been getting a lot of attention this year, but it's at historic lows and there's no real way to significantly lower total federal spending there without cutting social programs millions of people depend on.
  - throwaway173738 1y ago
    A lot of us knew it was going to be a disaster before they started. There’s a reason bureaucrats do things in a measured way. So to say “in hindsight” belies the point.
  - sumeno 1y ago
    A disaster was the expected outcome to anyone paying attention. We were screaming to the rooftops that this was going to end in disaster! Nobody should be playing the "shucks nobody realized this was going to be bad" card
    - rurp 1y ago
      Exactly! Many people on HN and elsewhere (including myself) could see that this was never a serious effort to make the government more efficient and called it out from the start. The evidence was overwhelming. It was dismaying how many people took the Doge claims at face value, hopefully at least a few people will remember the chain of events and be more skeptical of these actors in the future.
  - garden_hermit 1y ago
    This disaster was exactly predicted by a ton of people, with foresight! To treat this as an unexpected outcome belies the exact lack of seriousness that characterized this whole ordeal
dylan604 1y ago
DOGE isn't SpaceX where getting it wrong is a chance to learn for the next iteration. These are human lives being affected by all of these mistakes that they are so nonchalantly making as if the humans are just NPCs in whatever game they are playing. Not only are these mistakes directly affecting humans with the loss of government jobs, they are also affecting citizens that depend on the services these employees worked. I don't care about your silver lining. The damage is done, and it is not easily unwound. All because they had no shits to give and too young to have the life experience to even come close to understanding just how damaging their decisions were.

rsynnott 1y ago

But he still doesn't seem to get the seriousness of the situation, at all. Like, he's saying no-one should have used his stuff, but also "It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script". For instance, imagine you have surgery, and die of a complication. Your relatives will feel very differently, and be in a very different legal situation, if the hospital's explanation is "surgeon was the bottom of their class" vs "yeah, we just handed a visiting 5 year old a scalpel to see what would happen". Neither are ideal, obviously, but the latter is _criminal_. The idiot in the article is clearly closer to the 5 year old than the scraping-a-pass surgeon; he is simply not in any way a proper person to have been given the sort of access or authority he was, this would have been obvious to whoever gave it to him, and whoever gave it to him is at least morally culpable.

bilbo0s 1y ago
I mean, hindsight is 20/20, but that's probably why it's a bad idea to give a gaggle-load of inexperienced tech sisses/bros the ability to do stuff like this. Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. Drawdowns of the federal government should be measured and deliberate and done by grey haired people not given to rash action. Not by a kid with a python script he thinks is kind of cool.
- roenxi 1y ago
  If anyone thinks drawdowns should be done of the US federal government they aren't anywhere near the levers of government. There hasn't been one of those in the best part of a century as I recall. > Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. I doubt anyone with decision making power is surprised - the flow of events has been both predictable and predicted. Whatever the goals with DOGE were it wasn't spending cuts or finding efficiencies. The first is in opposition to the preferences of the US Republicans as expressed in their actual voting patterns and the second is largely irrelevant and they weren't set up to do that.
  - acdha 1y ago
    > There hasn't been one of those in the best part of a century as I recall. That’s just saying your media diet doesn’t cover it. Agencies adjust all the time (every year has a new budget and priorities from Congress), and there was a big Clinton effort which cut hundreds of thousands of jobs and restructured agencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinventing_Government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv... That tends not to get mentioned because it wasn’t disruptive – they actually took time to plan it – and because it happened under a Democratic president, the Republicans aren’t going to acknowledge it.
    - roenxi 1y ago
      And it had no impact [0]. Increases in US Federal spending look like a jump from 5% to 20% of GDP. "Cuts" look like a flat line at 20%. Although I don't know what the situation might have changed post-COVID (higher again). If we're defining "drawdowns" to mean "hold steady" then sure, lots of those. If it means drawing spending down then there technically was one in the 1940s. The proper terms for what we're seeing are "reallocation" or "expansion" depending on the congress. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...
      - acdha 1y ago
        Take a closer look at that chart. Notice the pronounced downward trend on the blue line (federal) starting from a peak in 1992 and declining until the Bush administration unbalanced the budget? In 1998-2001, we had a budget surplus! https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs-images/44xxx/44715-land-figure3-1.png https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs... https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181 The big thing, of course, is that total spending is a crude metric lumping discretionary and mandatory spending together. Federal employment has been getting a lot of attention this year, but it's at historic lows and there's no real way to significantly lower total federal spending there without cutting social programs millions of people depend on.
- throwaway173738 1y ago
  A lot of us knew it was going to be a disaster before they started. There’s a reason bureaucrats do things in a measured way. So to say “in hindsight” belies the point.
- sumeno 1y ago
  A disaster was the expected outcome to anyone paying attention. We were screaming to the rooftops that this was going to end in disaster! Nobody should be playing the "shucks nobody realized this was going to be bad" card
  - rurp 1y ago
    Exactly! Many people on HN and elsewhere (including myself) could see that this was never a serious effort to make the government more efficient and called it out from the start. The evidence was overwhelming. It was dismaying how many people took the Doge claims at face value, hopefully at least a few people will remember the chain of events and be more skeptical of these actors in the future.
- garden_hermit 1y ago
  This disaster was exactly predicted by a ton of people, with foresight! To treat this as an unexpected outcome belies the exact lack of seriousness that characterized this whole ordeal

dylan604 1y ago

DOGE isn't SpaceX where getting it wrong is a chance to learn for the next iteration. These are human lives being affected by all of these mistakes that they are so nonchalantly making as if the humans are just NPCs in whatever game they are playing. Not only are these mistakes directly affecting humans with the loss of government jobs, they are also affecting citizens that depend on the services these employees worked. I don't care about your silver lining. The damage is done, and it is not easily unwound. All because they had no shits to give and too young to have the life experience to even come close to understanding just how damaging their decisions were.